NASA To Host Live Events For November 4 Comet Encounter

November 2, 2010

NASA will hold a series of news and educational events about the EPOXI mission’s close encounter with comet Hartley 2, scheduled to occur at approximately 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT) on Thursday, Nov. 4. The spacecraft will provide the most extensive observations of a comet in history.

Tuesday, Nov. 2: The public is invited to a free lecture on Nov. 2 by the discoverer of comet Hartley 2, Malcolm Hartley. The lecture will take place at JPL’s von Karman Auditorium at 7 p.m. PDT. Hartley, a resident of Coonabarabran, Australia, discovered the comet on March 15, 1986. More information on the lecture, called “NASA’s Going to My Comet,” is online at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures_archive.cfm?year=2010&month=11. The event will also be carried live at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2, with question-and-answer capability.

The public can watch a real-time animation of the EPOXI comet flyby using NASA’s new “Eyes on the Solar System” Web tool. JPL created this 3-D environment that allows people to explore the solar system directly from their computers. Visit http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes.

EPOXI is an extended mission that utilizes the already “in-flight” Deep Impact spacecraft to explore distinct celestial targets of opportunity. The term EPOXI is a combination of the names for the two extended mission components: the Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCh), and the Hartley 2 flyby, called the Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI). For more information about EPOXI, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/epoxi and http://epoxi.umd.edu.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the EPOXI mission for NASA.